More UK Daily Comic Strips - The Perishers

[geordieboy56]

Ok, here's a question for you. What daily comic strip am I describing. The main characters are all children, there's a young boy who owns a dog (whose thoughts we hear), there's a young girl who has a very forthright and overbearing manner, a boy who she constantly pursues despite his unwillingness to go out with her, and her younger brother who quite often is the most sensible of the lot.



well, it's obvious from the title of this post that, it's not Peanuts, but "The Perishers", a british comic strip written by Maurice Dodd which started in the late 50's and ran until his death until 2006. It was drawn initially by Dodd, then by Denis Collins, and after Collins retirement Dodd took over again, until Bill Melvin took over the art duties until the end of the strip.

Despite it's superficial similarities to Peanuts, the characters in Perishers are of a lower class, and there's a less sentimentality about the writing.


As an introduction to the characters, I can do no better than let the author introduce them. At the beginning of each collection there were 3 pages of introduction





Boot the dog, believed he was actually a human Lord, who had been turned into a dog by a gypsy



Masie was always pursuing Marlon, despite his total lack of interest



One of the things I like about the strip is the detail in the background. Many of the strips were polyptychs, where the background of the whole strip was one continuous image, and the characters moved from one panel to the next, as seen in these 2 examples below




I could post a lot of different strips, there are many recurring characters (my favourite is Fiscal Yere, whose father is a millionaire and who is usually seen with a chocolate cigar), but for this post, i'll concentrate on perhaps the most well known part of the strip which occured every summer. The Perishers took the kids off on holiday to the seaside, whereupon Boot would wander off and take a look in a rockpool to observe the crabs that lived there. Unbeknown to him, these crabs had made a religion out of the annual appearance of "The Eyeballs in the Sky". Here is a full selection of strips from one of those visits (taken from one of the few collections to feature the strips coloured).

Comments

[bulastar]

Oh wow, I remember this! I never liked the Perishers as I liked Beano or Footrot Flats, but I did enjoy the strips about the dog, Boots.

[geordieboy56]

oh, I loved the Beano too. Must admit I don't recall Footrot Flats though.

[bulastar]

Footrot Flats isn't very popular outside of Australasia, sadly. It's a New Zealand-based strip about a border collie named Dog, his farm owner and their friends/family/livestock. It's of huge cultural significance in NZ, and was made into a movie (incidently, the song of the movie, "Slice of Heaven", is quite awesome).

I might do a Footrot Flats post in the future, but I'll have to go dig out the old anthologies.

[geordieboy56]

oh please do. I love finding out about new strips and comics from around the world. :-)

[icon_uk]

I have a couple of copies of Footrot Flats collections I picked up when visiting NZ, I'd been thinking about posting some too. :)

[domino_blue]

I left the Uk when I was about 5 so my memory about the comics I may have read there are vague at best and I don't think I read this one and this is actually really good reading even as a adult.

[geordieboy56]

i'm glad you liked it :D

[bean_montag]

Fantastic! I've never even heard of this but will keep an eye out for a collection. I love all the filler dialogue (the little crabs, the kids).

[geordieboy56]

you can pick the collections up pretty cheaply in the uk from amazon and ebay. i imagine there'll be some on amazon.com and ebay.com too :-)

they're worth a read :-)

[smirnoffmule]

OMG this looks familiar. I think this was a strip that was sort of vaguely in my consciousness as a kid, but I was never really into it. I love the dog who thought he was a lord.

Also, was I the only one whose first thought on reading Maisie and Marlon's bio was oh wow, lesbians? IDK why Marlon hit me as a girl's name since it's plainly not, but still, I'm choosing to stick with this first interpretation.

[geordieboy56]

yes, Boot is (like Snoopy) probably the most interesting character in it :-)

[psychopathicus_rex]

Oh, cool - I've read about this one, and I've seen a few strips here and there on the 'net, but this is pretty nifty nonetheless. Not living in the UK, my chances of picking up a collection somewhere are fairly slim, so - more! More, I say!

[geordieboy56]

the collections are pretty cheap to pick up in the uk, so if you see one i'd definitly suggest trying it :D

i'll see what i can cobble together to do another post maybe at the weekend. :-)

[psychopathicus_rex]

Well, I live in hope...

[citygod]

Haven't seen this in years! (Used to read it in the Daily Mirror every day, when I was a kid.) Boot was terrific, and beautifully drawn - wasn't he voiced by Leonard Rossiter on the cartoon? Thanks for posting, and thanks for a new word: polyptych. Great effect (Eisner used it a lot, too) and lovely example.

[geordieboy56]

yes, Leonard Rossiter voiced Boot in the cartoon. Wasn't the greatest cartoon, but Rossiter was absolutely perfect casting :-)

[ormardu.blogspot.com]

Great work geordieboy56!

I liked reading about these kids. Like Hagar strips like this are so good to read again and again.

[geordieboy56]

thanks :D

i'll maybe post some more later this week.

[icon_uk]

I don't think I was aware until reading wikipedia that Wellington was an orphan who lived with Boot in an abandoned railway station (the station having been closed down by the Beeching Axe)

Love the "Eyeballs in the Sky" sequence.

Oh, and bonus points for listening to "I don't want to live on the moon", FAB song that one.

[geordieboy56]

yes, it's one of the strange things, that although we hear Masie and Baby Grumplings mother often, Wellington and Boot live alone.

The Eyeballs in the Sky were often the highlight of the strips, wonderful stuff :-)

ah yes...an absolute classic song :D